Kurt Kauper paints historical and imagined figures, along with the occasional still life. His subjects range from recognizable cultural icons—such as Cary Grant and the Obamas—to more archetypal figures, including athletes, opera divas, “men” and “women.” Though meticulously rendered with illusionistic clarity and formal precision, his works are marked by narrative ambiguity and indeterminacy, attempting to find order in the contradictions, transience and instability of identity, desire, social expectations, economic conditions and family responsibilities.
Despite these thematic undercurrents, Kauper considers himself primarily driven by formal concerns. Rather than emphasizing narrative clarity, his paintings attempt to complicate form and assert their own weight and presence, independent of the subjects they depict or the stories they suggest: for both political and aesthetic reasons, he hopes to prompt in viewers a prolonged engagement with perception itself.
Kurt Kauper (b. 1966, Indianapolis, Indiana) lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from Boston University in 1988 and his MFA from UCLA in 1995. Kauper has had solo exhibitions at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2022); Almine Rech Gallery, New York (2018); ACME Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); and Deitch Projects, New York (2009). He has been included in numerous institutional exhibitions, including “Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); “Flesh,” Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2021); “Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Identity in Sports,” Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (2009); “Cheir Peintre,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National D’Art Moderne, Paris (2002); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), among others. His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, California; the Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. He is the recipient of grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. He is currently a Professor of Art at Queens College, Queens, New York.
